What’s my Motivation

For those readers still entombed in concrete operations, the answer is simple.

Money.

But that’s not what I mean. Sure, I mean money, but there are more reasons to take on various tasks in life and to do a credible job.

There’s passion, there’s commitment, there’s shame. And money.

Nice, so far I’ve thown mildly connected references to Piaget and Maslow all in a broken sentence or two.

I’ve never had any acting skills. It actually took me many years to get comfortable with public speaking. I once saw a professionally produced videotape of a presentation that I had made to a large audience who I couldn’t see because of the overwhelmingly bright stage lighting.

I was amazed at how flat the jokes fell and how many bizarre bodily movements I made. That videotape is entombed, as well.

Honestly, I had no idea tha I changed into pajamas during the presentation, but the videotape doesn’t lie.

My one true stage role was in 8th grade, performing in the Alfred Noyes classic poem, “The Highwayman”.

In that case, the problem was that I could see the audience.

I had the role of the horse. And instead of saying “Tlot, tlot”, I was supposed to stamp my feet in cadence as someone else recited the particular stanza.

Much like knowing when to buy and sell stocks, my timing wasn’t very good, but I swear, one more uptick and I’m unloading my Freddie Mac. Just want to cut those losses.

But for actors, there is a school that teaches going deeply into one’s self and looking for life experiences, immersion into character and asking the basic question, “What’s my motivation?”

I have no idea what depths Laurence Olivier may have plumbed to reach into Hamlet’s pain and his bond to Yorick, but it is undeniably powerful.

Years later I discovered that I loved harness horse racing, but I couldn’t pull that as yet unexperienced experience into my being as a 13 year old Yeshivah boy on stage. That is why it appeared as if Bess, the landlord’s daughter was trampled on that stage one cold Thursday afternoon in The Bronx.

Most days I sit around and watch alternating blasts of red and green numbers while listening to #CNBC in the background. Usually there’s something that I hear or read that just starts the thought process and that fuels the motivation. It’s almost as if the very process of existing is itself the muse.

Don’t worry. I don’t know what that means either.

But today, there was nothing. Sure, there were some well groomed House Republicans in very tightly bound shirts at the neckline, but there was nothing to really get the juices flowing.

As a sometime Pediatric Dentist, even the brief CNBC story about the average Tooth Fairy payment being reduced by nearly 15%, according to a Visa survey, didn’t get me overly immersed in thought or in a fit of indignant rage.

The paradox in that report is that many children don’t accept American Express for their Tooth Fairy payments due to the high transaction fees, yet Visa may offer credit limit constraints. Isn’t it better to let your parent assume greater levels of debt so that you can enjoy greater rewards right now.

Besides, there’s only so many teeth that you have to give. Your best days may already be behind you.

Yet, the shallow analysis of this all important story didn’t as much as stir me.

Errie, how that simple financial decision faced by the ntion’s children is so very similar to the dilemma facing our child-like elected officials. How do we balance spending cuts with revenue enhancements? How mucjh longer do we kick things down the road?

Then it came to me.

Actually, it came to my bank account first. You see, after all, it was about money.

If I actually had a day job I would probably continue to take steps to secure that job, as the royalties weren’t earth shattering, but I don’t have a day job.

Initially, my motivation for stepping up my trading game was to dump the day job and that’s worked out pretty well, even when the market tends to get petulant. Today, in complete boredom, I bought some shares of Sprint, which got a huge earnings related hit today, but I can thank Option to Profit for making that possible.

I also sold $14 call options on the ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF, as silver took a big drop today.

Remember, they’re UltraShort. Down is good and as silver went down, the premiums on the options went up.

I don’t use the word “petulant” often, but this morning Ken Langone, formerly co-founder of Home Depot, a current holding, referred to President Obama as being such.

I like Home Depot and I like Ken Langone. I especially admired his outspoken ctiticism of then Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, with regard to his witch hunts of Dick Grasso and Hank Greenberg.

I don’t agree with Langone on very many things in terms of actual politics, but I do like his heartfelt and pragmatic approaches to issues.

Talk about motivation. Here is a billionaire devoting so much of his time, efforts and energy to advancing healthcare. That’s pretty nice. He certainly doesn’t need to do that. Years from now, people will look at the Langone Medical Center, part of NYU and have no clue that he toiled anonymously. To be fair, Langone actually seemed embarrassed with host Joe Kernen let the audience know that he was referring to the Langone center. And when confronted with being outted, Langone corrected the host by pointing out that his wife had first billing. As Bernie Marcus would say: “A Mensch”

While I really don’t agree with his assessment of the President, as eventually going down as the worst in history, he did have a very compelling assessment of the very positive role of wealthy people in our society, particularly in advancing education and the arts.

He also very clearly said that people of great wealth should pay higher taxes and shouldn’t avail themselves of such government programs as Social Security.

He’ll get a lot of hate mail on that one, but not from me. Partially because I don’t do that kind of thing and the other is that it was so refreshing to hear someone take a balanced approach to an issue that effects us all.

Anyway, that first royalty payment was a motivator to pound out some more tripe for the blog. After all, I can’t continue to fall back on yesterday’s fame, not if I want to sell books by the truckload.

Since I’m not greedy, even a Karmen Ghia would do just fine.Just load her up.

I decided not to really bother waiting for the upcoming congressional vote on the new iteration on what is being called the Boehner Plan.

With a divided Senate and House of Representatives and the threats being made of bill defeat or veto, it just pays to sit back and watch the brinksmanship from the comfort of the La-Z-Boy.

At the moment it appears that there is a new operational definition of what it means to have bipartisan support. It appears that both parties have borrowed a page from Ivory Soap’s old playbook.

As long as either party puts forth a bill that has only 99.44% of support from a single party, it is qualified to be referred to as a bipartisan bill. Within the Washington D.C. Beltway, the definition of “b-partisan” was formed by the same person that decided it was accurate to refer to Bradley International Airport in Connecticut as such because it had a single daily flight to Canada.

So the game will continue and August 2nd just approaches.

I’ll be on my way to South Carolina along with Sugar Momma and my day trader son to watch @PFCAcsMan graduate from his Army Basic Training. I won’t care too much about whether it’s all being taken down to the wire or not.

I don’t have much iun the way of debt, so I don’t care too much about the worst case scenarios regarding the nation’s credit rating.

Obviously I know that’s incredibly short sighted of me. But right now, my motivation is getting my family together after a 9 week separation.

Once that’s happened, I’ll be very happy, but I’ve committed myself to finding fault with at least one new thing each day.